LOL, leave it to WaPo to stir up trouble over the Phoenix baptism story

(((Michelle Boorstein))) right out of the box whips out her pilpul, here:

Their marriages, confessions, promises of salvation — all of these things ceased to exist for thousands of Catholics baptized by an Arizona priest who, it turns out, was saying the sacrament script wrong. ... diocesan officials ... said last month that people who Arango baptized aren’t technically Catholic. That means they weren’t eligible, from a Catholic point of view, for other sacraments.

 

Except the diocese didn't actually say so:

According to the Diocese of Phoenix, Arango remains in "good standing" as a priest and "has not disqualified himself from his vocation and ministry." As of right now, other sacraments performed by Arango are considered valid, the diocese said.

More. 

Still, ex opere operato is having a bad week.

The diocese is obviously confused because the bishop is. He evidently doesn't understand that doctrine. Though defending the "other sacraments performed" by the errant priest, the bishop nevertheless has said, "You will need to be baptized."

St. Augustine would have disagreed.

The bishop of Hippo in North Africa taught the church in the Donatist Controversy that the validity of sacraments doesn't depend on the character of the priest, or on his theology. The sacraments work by themselves as long as they are reasonably Christian and the individuals come under the jurisdiction of the Catholic church.

All the attention here is misplaced on the personal pronouns used, "I baptize you" vs. "We baptize you", in keeping with the spirit of the current age, when the triune formula "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost" plus the corporate idea is the important thing according to Augustine. Arguably "We baptize you" emphasizes the latter, in good Augustinian manner.

Augustine's principles are charitable and Pauline. The bishops could learn from them.

Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will. The latter do it out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel; the former proclaim Christ out of partisanship, not sincerely but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment. What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed; and in that I rejoice. 

-- Philippians 1:15ff.

 

 

 

The Arminian Roger Olson, hostile to Augustine, does not believe God is "infinite" and is therefore outside the catholic faith

Here, already from a young age, which ought to tell you something (enthusiasm dies hard):

I long ago rejected the notion that God is “infinite.” I rejected it when I first heard it articulated which was probably in some seminary class. I immediately thought that the concept itself was beyond comprehension (except perhaps in mathematics) and that attributing it to God led away from thinking of God as personal, present, involved, loving and able to be affected by us. With Brightman (who I only learned about later) I thought of that attribute of God in traditional theology as an inappropriate expansion of the concept of God brought into Christian thought through philosophy, not the Bible.

Compare the Athanasian Creed:

And the catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; Neither confounding the Persons; nor dividing the Essence. For there is one Person of the Father; another of the Son; and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one; the Glory equal, the Majesty coeternal. Such as the Father is; such is the Son; and such is the Holy Ghost. The Father uncreated; the Son uncreated; and the Holy Ghost uncreated. The Father unlimited; the Son unlimited; and the Holy Ghost unlimited. The Father eternal; the Son eternal; and the Holy Ghost eternal. And yet they are not three eternals; but one eternal. As also there are not three uncreated; nor three infinites, but one uncreated; and one infinite [et unus immensus]. 

Hilary of Poitiers, On the Councils (composed in 359), thought it was a mark of safety to employ expansion in theology in order to avoid error (unlike Olson), and that the profusion of definitions appropriately mimics the boundlessness of God:

The infinite and boundless [infinitus et immensus] God cannot be made comprehensible by a few words of human speech. Brevity often misleads both learner and teacher, and a concentrated discourse either causes a subject not to be understood, or spoils the meaning of an argument where a thing is hinted at, and is not proved by full demonstration. The bishops fully understood this, and therefore have used for the purpose of teaching many definitions and a profusion of words that the ordinary understanding might find no difficulty, but that their hearers might be saturated with the truth thus differently expressed, and that in treating of divine things these adequate and manifold definitions might leave no room for danger or obscurity.

The reductionism of the Reformation is a contrary tendency.

Same sex marriage is no marriage, and is no law

"A law which is not just does not seem to me to be a law" (lex mihi esse non videtur, quae iusta non fuerit).

St. Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio, Book 1, 5, 1 1

Anti-protestant silliness on the Pericope Adulterae from Joel J. Miller

Joel Miller here on John 7:53ff., the favorite New Testament cudgel of liberals everywhere:

"[W]hat should we make of the faith of all those Christians that lived before this reconstruction [which excludes the pericope from John], including great exegetes like Augustine or Chrysostom, or pastors who led the church before even the canon (let alone this imagined reconstruction) was settled?"

Well, what should we make of the faith of all those Christians that lived with a Gospel of John without the passage, including the readers of:

Papyri 66 (c. 200) and 75 (early 3rd century); Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus (4th century), also apparently Alexandrinus and Ephraemi (5th), Codices Washingtonianus and Borgianus also from the 5th century, Regius from the 8th, Athous Lavrensis (c. 800), Petropolitanus Purpureus, Macedoniensis, Sangallensis and Koridethi from the 9th century and Monacensis from the 10th; Uncials 0141 and 0211; Minuscules 3, 12, 15, 21, 22, 32, 33, 36, 39, 44, 49, 63, 72, 87, 96, 97, 106, 108, 124, 131, 134, 139, 151, 157, 169, 209, 213, 228, 297, 388, 391, 401, 416, 445, 488, 496, 499, 501, 523, 537, 542, 554, 565, 578, 584, 703, 719, 723, 730, 731, 736, 741, 742, 768, 770, 772, 773, 776, 777, 780, 799, 800, 817, 827, 828, 843, 896, 989, 1077, 1080, 1100, 1178, 1230, 1241, 1242, 1253, 1333, 2193 and 2768; the majority of lectionaries; some Old Latin, the majority of the Syriac, the Sahidic dialect of the Coptic, the Gothic, some Armenian, Georgian mss. of Adysh (9th century); Diatessaron (2nd century); apparently Clement of Alexandria (died 215), other Church Fathers namely Tertullian (died 220), Origen (died 254), Cyprian (died 258), Nonnus (died 431), Cyril of Alexandria (died 444) and Cosmas (died 550) ?

What were those Christians, chopped liver?

"Rather than a collection of texts written in and for the church and recognized as valid by that church, biblical books and even minute passages now become arbitrated by scholars."

Well, no. The above collection of texts without the pericope is arbitrated as valid by scribes, who presumably were themselves Christians. But apparently their voices don't count as the voice of the church to Joel Miller.

"If the church doesn’t validate the text, who does? In this instance, scholarly consensus is consulted to 'uncanonize' a portion of generally received scripture."

Sorry, no. The absence of the pericope suggests churchmen "uncanonized" it long before contemporary scholars did. Martin Luther did nothing different. Joel Miller just doesn't want to face it.

"Sola Scriptura becomes queer indeed when ideas from outside Scripture are determining what goes into it."

Well, if some extra-Biblical principle was at work excluding the pericope from the manuscript evidence, it pre-dated the Reformation by a thousand years and was operating in scriptoria funded by churches all over the place. What's with the anti-protestantism, Miller?

"[I]nerrancy becomes equally queer when ... Christians have been hearing a bunk passage read from the lectionary and expounded from the pulpit for centuries."

Just because there are obvious suspect passages like John 7:53ff. and the famous 1 John 5:7f. and Mark 16:9ff. based on the manuscript evidence doesn't "bunkify" the rest of John, 1 John or Mark anymore than the selectivity exercised by lectors in churches for 1,900 years has.

No one suggests Matthew 10:23 isn't original to Matthew just because it's avoided by the church like the plague.

Like Evangelicals, Roman Catholics and Methodists Have Problems With Mormonism

As reported here:

For Christians, calling yourself a Christian while not believing that God has always existed as the triune Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is as inconceivable.

This is not simply a conservative evangelical Christian view. Methodists have said "the LDS Church is not a part of the historic, apostolic tradition of the Christian faith." Even Roman Catholics (hardly conservative Protestants) don't recognize LDS baptism.

The problem is that, in America, everybody's an expert: If you say you are xyz, you are xyz. Even though you most definitely, unequivocally, are not xyz.

Russell Kirk once said that Christianity wasn't a failure, it's just that it has never really been tried. Quite the condemnation, that, on Paul, Augustine and Luther among others, when you think about it. Or on Thomas Aquinas.

I'll go him one better, though, since fools rush in where angels fear to tread: Jesus had no disciples in his lifetime, and he's never had any since. He just hasn't been around to correct the record which states otherwise.

At most one might venture to say that Jesus has had imitators who took themselves almost as seriously as he took himself.

But apart from that opinionated air, it is probably more useful for the issue at hand to accept at face value the early observation that "Christian" was in truth an epithet applied by outsiders. It was not originally a term of self-description:

"And in Antioch the disciples were for the first time called Christians" (Acts 11:26).

Jews in particular understood believers in Jesus like Paul to be members of a sect of Judaism, a cult if you will, which was not officially recognized, in a way similar to how Christians today do not recognize Mormonism, which borrows from Christianity quite freely and builds something new on it.

Interestingly enough, the self-designation which Paul mentions in referring to this fact is follower of "The Way":

"But this I admit to you, that according to the Way, which they call a sect, I worship the God of our fathers, believing everything laid down by the law or written in the prophets" (Acts 24:14).

That self-description goes back directly to the teaching of Jesus:

"Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide [is] the gate, and broad [is] the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait [is] the gate, and narrow [is] the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it" (Matthew 7:13f.).

For Paul, those belonging to "the few" became an increasingly larger number beyond just the lost sheep of the house of Israel:


"Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into [any] city of the Samaritans enter ye not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (Matthew 10:5f).

But there Paul did go, and the rest, as they say, is history. Which I think goes a little way toward explaining religious innovation in our own time, Mormon innovation included.

Augustine: In Favor of the Death Penalty, and of the Just War

"The same divine authority that forbids the killing of a human being establishes certain exceptions, as when God authorizes killing by a general law or when He gives an explicit commission to an individual for a limited time.

"The agent who executes the killing does not commit homicide; he is an instrument as is the sword with which he cuts. Therefore, it is in no way contrary to the commandment, 'Thou shalt not kill' to wage war at God's bidding, or for the representatives of public authority to put criminals to death, according to the law, that is, the will of the most just reason."

-- The City of God, Book 1, chapter 21